Levitta Lawrence, 21, of East Orange, majors in architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and tied for first place with her modern home designed with an inverted truss.Eunice Lee/The Star-Ledger

EAST ORANGE — What does it take to build a livable home for under $100 per square foot?

For a group of architecture students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, that question was answered in a semester-long project that ended last week.

The project culminated with two students winning top honors among their classmates by having their projects selected for construction by Habitat for Humanity.

The winners who tied for first place — Levitta Lawrence, 21, of East Orange, and Andres Ormeno, 30, of Clifton — both designed a two-floor, single-family home with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms. A six-judge panel selected their homes to be built on five lots in East Orange, the second largest municipality in Essex County. They will be the first Habitat homes built in East Orange, leaders of both the nonprofit and city confirmed.

To build those houses anywhere else would cost $200,000 to $300,000, said Darius Sollohub, director of the New Jersey School of Architecture at NJIT who oversaw the project. The students worked within a demanding list of requirements for a roughly 1,500-square-foot home on a narrow lot in the Greenwood redevelopment area for under $100 per square foot.

"It’s a complicated thing that students have to juggle to pull off," Sollohub said.

Started in 2009, the annual contest is a partnership between Habitat for Humanity Newark and NJIT that’s resulted in student-designed homes built in cities like Newark and Paterson. This year with Hurricane Sandy disrupting classes for two weeks, the students completed in 12 weeks what they normally do in 14 weeks.

Also helping but completed their projects under the watchful eye of Sollobus and Jak Inglese, a practicing architect with extensive experience in affordable housing.

Designing homes for the Greenwood neighborhood isn’t an easy task, East Orange administrator Jillian Barrick noted. The area comprises roughly a dozen blocks along Williams Street in East Orange, just northeast of the intersection of Interstate 280 and the Garden State Parkway.

Most of the homes there are Victorian-style houses built at the turn of the century. But the markedly different designs created by Lawrence and Ormeno managed to strike a balance, she said.

"(Their homes) will fit into the neighborhood while not being a cookie cutter," said Barrick, who earned an undergraduate degree in architecture from Georgia Tech. "I was thoroughly impressed by the work that they put together and the thoughtfulness that went into the project."

Lawrence has lived in East Orange since age 7 but said she was surprised to see the blighted area. Early in the semester, Sollohub’s students met with residents of Habitat homes to learn about their real-life needs. That’s when Lawrence decided she needed to put a half-bathroom on the first floor, despite her tight budget.

"Those things were missing. It brought us back down to earth," she said.

Lawrence’s design, a modern take on the inverted truss, stands out with a unique roof line but keeps functionality in mind. She was inspired to use the unconventional inverted truss from a Habitat project done by college students at Rice University in Houston. Lawrence pictured a single mom with three kids living there.

Similarly, Ormeno said budget constraints forced him to get creative.

"It’s kind of hard because it’s give and take," he said. His home was framed around a centrally located stairway that used natural light from several directions to fill an otherwise confined space.

The jury was unanimous in wanting to award the two finalists, Sollohub said. The two projects had many different design elements but both met an exceptionally high standard of quality, he said. Both winners scored paid internships with an architecture firm tasked with the actual construction.

Also, Sollohub noted, part of the logic of having two winners was that one design would be a corner lot and the other would be situated in between other homes.

"They’re both very, very graceful," he said. "The drawings were thorough, they were complete, they were professional grade."

The next step is for the city to transfer the title of the lots to Habitat. In the coming weeks the plans will go before the city’s planning board. Officials hope the five new homes in East Orange will add momentum to an effort to revitalize a depressed part of town.

"It’ll be a boost, increase some pride (in) the area," Mayor Robert Bowser said. "Maybe it can become contagious."

"I think it’s easy for people to write off certain neighborhoods or cities as places that will never be helped or helped to a great extent. That’s when a fresh perspective like a student’s can be helpful," Reckford said.